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Alabama jobs: By Bentley's own measuring stick, he's failing

Robert Bentley

In this photo taken June 6, 2013 Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley talks with reporters at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. Bentley filed a campaign finance report Tuesday, July 2, 2013 showing he took in $422,500 in contributions in his first month of fundraising for his re-election campaign. He had raised about $15,500 at the same point four years ago, when he was a little-known state representative from Tuscaloosa running in the Republican primary with six other candidates. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
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AL.com Opinion

About the writer Kyle Whitmire writes political commentary for the Alabama Media Group. His work appears regularly in newspapers in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile and is online at AL.com all the time. Reach him at kwhitmire@al.com.

Even before he took office three and half years ago, Robert Bentley made Alabama jobs his signature issue. The state, like the rest of the country, had been hit hard by the Great Recession, and until it recovered, he promised not to draw a paycheck.

Going into the elections this fall, Gov. Bentley is still talking about jobs, bragging on jobs Remington is bringing to Huntsville and jobs Golden Dragon is bringing to Wilcox County.

But a hard look at the numbers doesn't bode well for the governor.

If I were him, I'd shut up about jobs, at least if he wants to be reelected.

This week, Bentley said he would debate his Democratic opponent, Parker Griffith, before the election this fall. Griffith has his own pet issues – Medicaid expansion, which the governor has eschewed, and the lottery, which curiously the governor and several other Republican leaders seem to be warming to.

No, in a debate, I'd beat the governor up over jobs. That was supposed to be Bentley's strength, but unless things change drastically between now and November, it could be the governor's Achilles' heel.

Welcome back, America

Before I get to Gov. Robert Bentley's greatest political weakness, first some good news.

In May, total non-farm employment in the United States returned to the same level as before the Great Recession began.

What does that mean?

Non-farm payrolls include mostly jobs created by businesses, excluding agriculture, household help and non-profit employees. As a statistic, it's a good measure of how many people are working. (As opposed to the unemployment rate, which I'll get to in a second.)

Of course, being back to December 2007 levels isn't good enough. There are more people in the job market than there was six and half years ago, at least in the country. But it's something.

And it's a lot better than we are doing in Alabama.

While nationally, non-farm payrolls have risen to 100.1 percent of what they were in December 2007, Alabama's job growth has languished.

At the worst point in the recession job-wise, Alabama's non-farm employment fell to 92.3 percent of its 2007 peak.

Since then, that number has crawled upward, but not nearly as quickly as the rest of the country.

As of April, Alabama had 95 percent of the jobs it had before the recession began.

In short, Alabama is not recovering at the same rate as the rest of the country, or even as quickly as its neighbors, which you can see on this chart below.

Unemployment rate climbs

So if the number of jobs in Alabama hasn't grown as quickly as elsewhere, why has the unemployment rate (mostly) dropped since 2008?

Because Alabama's workforce is shrinking, either because older workers are retiring faster than new ones join the workforce, or because the unemployed have given up on finding work. The general consensus is around the latter.

However, even that measure is moving again in the wrong direction.

In April, Alabama's unemployment rate climbed to 6.9 percent. That's 0.2 percent higher than it was the month before, and 0.4 percent higher than one year before.

Alabama Media Group's Alex Walsh broke down what that means this way: "Fewer Alabamians have jobs, and more of them are officially unemployed, according to the Department of Labor. Before adjusting for seasonality, the number of employed Alabamians decreased by more than 20,000, and the number of unemployed grew by 10,000. Another 10,000 left the labor force entirely."

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